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HP Unveils 'The Machine,' a New Computer Architecture
pacopico writes: HP Labs is trying to make a comeback. According to Businessweek, HP is building something called The Machine. It's a type of computer architecture that will use memristors for memory and silicon photonics for interconnects. Their plan is to ship within the next few years. As for The Machine's software, HP plans to build a new operating system to run on the novel hardware. The new computer is meant to solve a coming crisis due to limitations around DRAM and Flash. About three-quarters of HP Labs personnel are working on this project.
What's the point in running a brand new OS on it? Is HP-UX not good enough? Or the many other *NIX's? I'll put money on Linux being ported to it before it even ships to Joe Public
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Finally! I'm so glad there's something to feel intrigued about in technology. I miss all the corporate labs doing amazing things.
I love linux/unix, but that sounds kind of sad to me.
It’s a bold strategy Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them.
If this doesn't work out, I can't see HP staying in business as an independent company.
The article yammers on and on about how the O/S will be built based on memory-driven I/O instead of file-system based I/O. However, IBM's i/OS (a.k.a. OS/400) has been built on memory-mapped I/O from the beginning (circa 1988.) (And it has a DB-driven "filesystem" that Microsoft has been unable to ship despite about 25 years of failure.)
I know it's not quite the same thing, but I cannot imagine that this new O/S will somehow eliminate the need for flash and/or disk. I don't see them managing to get the memristor cost down enough to entirely replace disk/flash. If they had actually shipped some of the things before now, I could maybe believe it, but they haven't.
Well, Meg Whitman had the guts to say "Find them some money" when HPLabs proposed the "Machine." I wish HP all the success.
It is about time some corporation stepped up to the plate other than Apple and jump-starts mega-improvement in major devices.
My first time sharing "Mini-computer" (was not mini sized), desktop engineering computer (using mag-strips pre-HP45), & then the HP35-41-45-75 were all incredible computing devices for their day.
There'a all kinds of possibilities. Machines of Loving Grace, Rage Against the Machine, NIN's Pretty Hate Machine album. There's a roller derby player going by Pretty Skate Machine.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
What's the point of running *nix on it? If the architecture is so much different that they have to rewrite tons of OS code to support it, why not just build their own?
*nix is the fastest path to a stable and highly usable platform. Only a small portion of *nix interfaces with the architecture. They only have to rewrite that small portion.
Plus with *nix you have a rather large base of application software to run as well.
That said, could other parts of *nix or apps be reworked to take advantage of the architecture, possibly. But such efforts do not need to be part of v1.0.0. They can be part of subsequent versions if and when profiling indicates an issue or opportunity.
The article tells me it's bullshit. Applications aren't written to wait for the memory bus; they're written to ask the kernel for resources, and handle that by waiting or operating asynchronously. If they wait, then they just block until the kernel returns--they don't go, "Oh, it's going to be a while, so I'll execute getSomeTea()..." There's nothing in applications to deal with timing.
From an OS perspective, execute-in-place has been a thing for years. Linux run from NAND uses XIP, hence why some JFFS2 configurations compress and some don't. Many implementations don't compress in small-RAM embedded systems, using MMIO to map the JFFS2 file system as a physical memory address and jump to it accordingly. That means Linux loads an mmap()ed binary into VMA by creating a page table entry that points to the MMIO page associated physically with the NAND, and not with any real RAM.
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And Meg will be the one that kills it because it doesn't have an ongoing revenue stream that provides 25% margins.
The new computer does not run on electricity. It runs on a new fuel cell that requires ink.
While HP Labs may not be what it was, it is good to see that HP finally has a CEO that will give them the funding they need to go for the big ideas. We need more research and development funding period. The government needs to increase funding for the NSF and other organizations. And, yes, big companies need to start making long term investments. Microsoft Research is growing. It seems HP Labs is growing again.
Let's hope other big players step up too. I'm tired of money being thrown at yet another mobile application and having that being held up as a paragon of innovation. People are being critical of HP investing in this while Facebook throws 19B of assets at a messaging application? What's wrong with this picture?
HP made their massive profits by controlling their IP and making everything in-house. In this case, they have outsourced a great deal of this work. As such, it will be in China within 2 years. At that point, whitman will lose everything.
As somebody that used to work for HP, I am saddened by this. They have great tech, but whitman's run for short-term profits is destroying the company.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
i am remember hp having visions of replacing x86 with a new architecture and then AMD did x86-64. hp should know by now that a totally new hardware platform and totally new operating system isnt going to fly very far. Why not replace ethernet and tcp/ip while they are at it....
True enough. Though I think MS's move may have less to due with stupidity than with maintaining their lock on the market. Just consider - once people get used to the atrocity they're having forced down their throats they won't want to change to any of those "old-fashioned" GUIs on Linux. Just look what happened to the oft-mocked "pre-school" GUI ornamentation introduced with XP - now practically *everybody* has a "lickable" GUI of some sort - even most of minimalist distros targeting low-end hardware. Expectations were changed, and competitors were forced to play catch-up. Force arbitrary changes often enough and your competitors don't stand a chance. These days the primary competition - KDE, and Gnome (Mac has always been it's own vertically-integrated thing) - all possess notable functional advantages over MS Windows, and can mimic the traditional Windows GUI moderately well, making for a relatively transition at the enterprise or personal level. Only power users will really notice the differences. Once people get used to MS Monstrosity 8 the competition will need to add the ability to mimic that horrible thing to maintain their "easy transition", and what sort of developer worth their salt would want to volunteer time to mimic THAT?
As far as "the Machine" is concerned though, it sounds like it's initially targeted at number-crunching applications where massive amounts of cheap persistent RAM stands to radically change the computing landscape - and that's a use-case where GUIs are often not installed at all. There's minimal benefit to a GUI on a server rack that doesn't even have a monitor. As such I would expect that it will be a matter of slapping on an existing solution, if they even concern themselves with a GUI at all.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'm all for more funding for researching new cutting edge technology but Whitman is going about it the wrong way. HP is laying off remote workers instead of the "dead weight" that routinely performs more poorly than their peers. What people don't understand is that remote workers at HP usually are stellar employees that had have to relocate due to some life event. Otherwise the possibility of remote work isn't even entertained. To cut the remote workers first, HP is taking themselves out before the competition does.
I'm sitting in the conference room where this was just announced at the HP Discover conference. The idea is to use photonics for interconnects, so that the limitations of copper don't require physical proximity to memory. And they want to use oxygen atoms with doubly-negative charge (ions) for data storage. The concept is to partner with universities to do some fundamental research and major changes in OS design to have a machine that can scale processor access to 160 PB of memory storage in microseconds.
None of this comprises fundamentally new ideas, but they are working hard to actually make it happen, which is pretty cool.
The guts?? The GUTS??
To pay for it, Meg just fired 30,000 people over the last 2 years, and is going to fire another 20,000 by next year. Sorry, Meg, that's chutzpah.
Anyone who's still at HP is hoping they're not next, or looking for another job.